The 1.2Kb python browser script

You can comfortably ignore the blue box in the upper left hand corner. This was meant to be a dual-purpose screenshot, showing the mystery browser on the right, along with mplayer playing a conventional DVD rip in Musca on a 300Mhz Celeron. Unfortunately, for reasons unbeknownst to mortal man, I got a blue box there rather than an action shot from the movie, which defeated half the purpose. :(

But there are no tricks or gimmicks at work here, except to say that the browser is all of about 1.5Kb on disk, written in python and has webkit as its core. No toolbars, controls, address bar or menus, save the right-click menu that appears with some very primitive options in it.

The name, however, remains a mystery to me. Perhaps it’s a well-known python exercise, or just a sample code snippet. In any case, you’re looking at it in Arch, with nothing more than gtk2 and the pywebkitgtk package from community installed. It’ll get 100/100 on the Acid3 test, renders images and fonts precisely and beautifully, and as you can see in that picture, can run at 300Mhz alongside Xorg, mplayer, alsaequal, alsamixer and Musca … and everything is hovering around 64Mb of memory total. Impressive.

But what’s the use in that? What good is a control-less browser window that needs to be fed a URL from the command line, a lapython browser.py http://kmandla.wordress.com ?

Well, if you’re one of those half-and-half tiling desktop users who prefers a console-only arrangement against X (like Awesome or xmonad or dwm) it should be fairly obvious. Here’s a worthy replacement for heavyweight graphical browsers that won’t encumber a running system and still give you a graphical page display.

So if you’re torn between elinks and Firefox, this might serve as a decent middle-ground. It’s guiltless: None of the lard that comes with Firefox, and yet you still get accurate and faithful page displays.

I could also see where this might be useful for page designers or web coders, who need something that can jack up a page quickly, then drop out of sight. Instant page view, so to speak. I’m sure there are other possibilities here that I haven’t thought of, that you could offer.

Now if only I knew the name. … :|

P.S.: Just for the record, because I have a feeling I’m going to be looking for the code in the future. …

If you cut and paste it from above, try it one more time. I forgot when I posted it this morning that WordPress.com, in its infinite wisdom, will parse out some characters and convert them to their html equivalents even if they are inside sourcecode tags. In other words, there was a character or two in there that appeared as ampersand-g-t-semicolon, when it should have been a greater-than symbol. No guarantee that’s the problem, but it’s one less possibility to consider.